Rob Passmore was formerly the Commercial Director of openDemocracy. Earlier he set up a number of his own businesses (including launching a music TV channel) and worked in the technology and advertising industries.

Stafford Beer achieved the hardest of all pedagogic tasks: he changed the way people think. His protean influence stretches from generations of inspired students, through Salvador Allendes Chile, to the collective brain of openDemocracy. A huge, life-affirming figure has passed, but his work will long survive, says our international editor.

Stafford Beer, philosopher,
scientist, poet, painter, founder of Management Cybernetics and world leader in
operational research, who has died at the age of 75, was much larger than life.
His handsome photograph in the Guardian obituary is entitled Subversive
Showman. If he fitted neatly into neither the British establishment, nor the
academic nor indeed the business world, it was partly because of the sheer
impact of the man  but also because of what he had to say.

His self-appointed task was to
bring an often unwelcome message to whoever would listen, including the
twenty-two governments who hired him as a consultant over the years, about the
need for effective organisation in companies, social services, great
institutions, whole countries, and international communities, if they were not
to be left behind by technological advance, threats to economic survival, and
loss of faith in established authority  by, in short, complexity and change.

Some people got it: they joined
the band of friends and followers from around the world, and were rewarded by
Staffords patient and loyal interest in their own efforts to apply what they
had learnt. They were inspired by his various favourite dicta, such as Dont
bite my finger: look where its pointing, or You accuse me of using big words
that you find hard to understand. But you need big words for big ideas. And you
should find it hard to understand.

Many more, who were nevertheless
profoundly influenced by his work, found these admonitions unfashionable and
irritating, and his many books unreadable. They often failed to see the
indefatigable energy which he devoted to trying to make himself better
understood: Staffords ideas in Latin, in thirteen languages, in poetry, in a
summary for business schools, as applied to car engines, hospitals, prisoners
or stars.

Understanding a dynamic system

Even in recent years, when the
prophetic vision was accompanied by a bardic white beard and much frustration
at the shrinking amount of time he had left to do what he wanted, those of us lucky
enough to meet him will never forget the feeling that you had been put on alert
by a life-force far larger than your own.

There are two of us in this
office. Rob Passmore, currently wrestling with our marketing plan, simply says:
He altered peoples lives. He changed my life. I think about what he had to
say on systems, every day. Robs encounter took place in the mid-1990s at
Swansea University, having opted for a third-year course in Managerial
Cybernetics. The first thing you registered was that he was absolutely
different to any other lecturer you had ever met. He simply wasnt harnessed to
the system. His interests ranged across disciplines, cultures and faiths. With
the class swiftly divided over his showmanship, Rob was one of those who liked
the twinkle in Staffords eye as he helped himself to another tot from the half-litre bottle of apple juice, which everyone knew was the white wine spritzer favoured by Lord Byron.

Mulier Peccatrix, a painting by Stafford Beer

They repaired to the pub to talk
about the days ideas after every lecture, and were frequently invited out for
sessions (perhaps including Staffords own special brand of yoga and Sanskrit
readings) at the small stone cottage in Ceredigion, mid-Wales, which was his
retreat once he renounced worldly possessions in the mid-1970s. Stafford, who
was tremendously proud when his many visiting chairs, presidencies and honorary
degrees were capped by the rare award to him of a DSc from the University of
Sunderland in 2000, nevertheless cut his own path. He made his way determinedly
down the academic food chain to an undergraduate level where he felt able to
work, untrammelled by the closed mind-sets of the higher reaches of the British
academic system. Rob for one, considered himself lucky.

What some people never forgave
him for was that he was right. The Viable System Model he was teaching was the
most effective model of any and every system that Ive ever come across. In his
most profound work, TheBrain of the FirmandtheHeart
of Enterprise, he takes as his subject no less complex and dynamic a system
than the human body itself, to show how that system, in order to be viable,
must stand up in its own right: what kind of processes it needs for effective
decision-making, development and implementation, and what kind of measurement.

Of course, Beers idea of a
system was not that of common parlance, as in a sales system set up to
operate like a machine in any eventuality. Beers system is completely
dynamic. Take the circulation of the blood, for example. You cannot map how
that works in a static way, by showing someone a picture of his or her veins.
What you have to understand is the circulatory system as a system of control.
Beers thinking revolved around that.

But there again, his notion of
control was not quite the same as anyone elses. It wasnt authoritarian. The
system exists anyway, whether it works or not. And the trick is to make
yourself conscious of its workings, by seeing how things change, each time they
come past you. Hence his abiding interest in appropriate feed-back loops, and
his constant emphasis on the advantage to be derived from a system that gives
the greatest possible autonomy of action to every level of its organisation,
not just the top.

Once Id finished the course, I
read all the books, and Ive got signed copies of all of them, because I just
knew that this was one man, a great soul, who could not only change, but
actually run the world 

Chile: from theory to practice

The nearest Stafford Beer came to
the latter was the period in the early 1970s he spent as an independent
consultant to Chiles president, Salvador Allende. From 1970, Stafford was
working on a national communications system, a new cybernetics-based control
system to be applied to the entire social economy of Chile.

It is still moving (not least
because of the inclusion of a marvellously evocative story describing Allendes
encounter with System 5 of Staffords VSM) to read the third Richard
Goodman Lecture he wrote for delivery in February 1973, in which he
describes the planned NOW and FUTURES systems which would provide Allendes
government with an instrument for investigating the systemic consequences of
alternative courses of action.

Stafford is himself on an
exponential learning curve, and his excitement is palpable. He is clearly aware
that the regime is under attack from all sides, but so proud of the experiment
that is underway in Chile, and of the lessons for humanity which he believes
to be unfolding there. The death of the president and all his close colleagues
only months later (which he learned from an Evening Standard
newsboard) left Stafford (see letters
in the Guardian) with an abiding hatred for the role of the United
States in the world: and, for him as for so many others, the strong sense
of a destiny unfulfilled.

Computer Volvox - painting by Stafford Beer

A syntegrity of minds

So
I first heard of him as the man who had worked to include Chilean trade
unionists in the decision-making processes for the Chilean economy. I was part
of a small left-wing organisation that, as we hurtled towards the demise of the
socialist state system, had become increasingly interested in democracy, but
was seemingly unable to practise what it preached. Luckily, our leader had read
Staffords books, and realised that this was also an organisational problem.
She was rewarded by Stafford and his partner and co-worker, Allenna
Leonard, taking a thorough interest in our fragile structures, and adopting
us as a guinea-pig to try out Staffords latest participatory method for
enabling large groups to solve their own problems: Team Syntegrity.

A
syntegration is a non-hierarchical, participatory form of conference, inspired
by Staffords realisation that all the good ideas at a conference come from the
corridors and the bars. It is based on the mathematical qualities of an
icosahedron (which we all began by making, with cocktail sticks and jelly
babies), and takes three-and-a-half days, and thirty people. In those early
days in 1990, it took a little longer, while enthusiasts sorted out the
computer algorithm. But the people who participated felt that what they
understood there, they might never have learnt in two or three years of the
most conscientious decision-making. The agreements we secured were beyond the
normal kind of consensus, as Stafford promised us they would be. They were
based on a much more thorough-going understanding of each others point of
view, and some core insights which soon emerged from very different types of
small-group conversation to reverberate throughout the whole event.

As
Rob and I mull over what we learned from Stafford, the two of us realise all
over again how much pleasure was involved, and how simple some of the best
ideas are. Take Robs favourite anecdote for explaining how you assess a
systems requisite variety: Take a football pitch, and eleven people on one
side. What do you need in order to stop them from scoring millions of goals?
Answer: eleven people on the other side, which is why football is such a
great game and why the thirty people at a syntegration need to be as various
as members of one organisation can get, if you want to plan effectively for the
future.

Or
take the concept best calculated to transform any political organisation, the
idea of the necessary porosity of any viable system to its outside
environment Oh yes, VSM system four, interjects Rob, happily . It seems
obvious. But take it together with requisite variety, reverberation,
recursion, and a few other vital processes, and nothing will ever be the same
again .

Rob
and I wouldnt want to give the impression that understanding Beer is easy
after all. Like most good things, its a life work. (For those who would like
to dip a toe in the water, we recommend his 1992 essay, World in
Torment: A Time whose Idea Must Come. The first one-and-a-half pages
make rather extraordinary reading at this dangerous moment in world affairs.)

Nor
can we honestly say that openDemocracy is a viable system, yet. (Rob is
working on our recursions as I write.) But it is no accident that we have both
ended up working here. And we will do what we can to introduce more Stafford
into the proceedings.

Nor
are we alone in this. Thank goodness, systems analysis is beginning to
penetrate our governments corridors, as well as the high places and more
creative places all over the world. (See, for example, Jake Chapmans recent DEMOS pamphlet, System Failure:
why governments must learn to think differently.) It may be a rather
immature version that has surfaced so far  one that simply fails to grasp the
holistic implications of Stafford Beers work. But his friends and followers
are also pretty indefatigable. So we will have to hope that his work will continue.
Because one thing is very clear, at least to Rob and myself. If it doesnt
happen, the world will miss out on far more than the unforgettable company of
this charming and unusual man.